This note is not about Google's motto. This is a note about moving away from evil-mode.

1 OK, but why?

Because evil-mode messed up the keybinding of so many packages I'm using (magit, neotree, org-mode agenda,…). I know there's a package to make these packages working nicely with evil, but eventually, these packages are not designed to work with evil in the first place.

Another reason, is that sticking with evil-mode make me feel I'm not really into Emacs, it's holding me back from exploring the real Emacs. So, if it's not org-mode that hold me back, I can just go back and use Vim instead.

At this point, we should take a break from the exploring and start using Emacs with these keybinding for a day or so, to get yourself being used with the changes.

For functions that you don't know, just start typing M-x, type some words and press tab to see the suggestion list, use it from here instead of your evil keybindings. There's no need to hurry.

2.4 Fourth step: Custom some keybinding

Now, it's time to take the control of Emacs and make it your. Before making the move to vanilla Emacs, I'm using general mode to make some custom keybinding. Now we can't use it, but we can just map the key directly using global-set-key.

This is some of my keybindings, first, we make some movement enhancement. I find it very useful to use super-k/j to jump by paragraph, it's faster than crawling line by line with C-n/p, next, instead of C-a for moving to beginning of the line, I change it to C-0.

3 Conclusion

After a day, I've been familiar enough with basic vanilla Emacs. I still miss a lot from Vim/Evil, but I feel much more confident. In fact, I do learn some more interesting Emacs feature, like C-x r t (rectangle-string), which I never tried in evil-mode.

The most concerned thing that stop me from switching to vanilla Emacs before is the ergonomic of using hjkl, it seems to be way more convenience than C-n/p/b/f. But tried it for a while, I think it's not that bad. Since it has another benefit, is you don't have to go back and forth from insert and normal mode. You'll feel more freedom.